Customer Reviews

I Killed: True Stories of the Road from America's Top Comics

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Publishers' Weekly review on this page says this book is fantastic "bathroom reading." I guess they mean that it's perfect for people who don't always have time to sit down and read for an hour or two at a stretch. Because the stories in here are so short, it's easy to read for ten minutes, get a few complete stories and good chuckles, and then put the book down for next time. There are well over a hundred stories in here so if you read the book this way it'll last you for a while!

The feeling of the book is a bit like the documentary The Aristocrats-- you get the feeling that the comics are not "performing" but just sitting back and exchanging their favorite crazy stories. Not all the stories are hilarious, but most of them are very entertaining and there are some that will stick in my mind for a LONG time. Some of the stuff these guys confess to is great--Chris Rock talking about call girls, Tom Arnold about murdering goldfish, many, many stories of one-night stands and drug use. I think my favorite story has to be Doug Stanhope's one about the 5-dollar streetwalker who turns out to have a couple of surprises hidden away. I also loved the one about the comic's mother and Rodney Dangerfield.

This is also a good book for anyone interested in the history of comedy--along with all the contemporary stuff, there are lots of stories about legendary comedy greats like Rodney Dangerfield, Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor, Andy Kaufman (Bob Zmuda contributes a great story about the Tony Clifton character).

This book doesn't go for the gross-out humor nearly as much as The Aristocrats did, but because it shows comics talking how they REALLY talk, it is definitely PG-13 or R-rated. But if you don't need your humor to be squeaky, sit-com clean (I certainly dont) then you will really get a kick out of this book.

A warning label should be posted on this book: Please allocate 4-6 hours of time before opening this book. You will not be able to put it down. I truly enjoyed this compilation of stories from the comedy trenches.
It will give me a lot more fodder for the next time I talk with these stand up road warriors. Buy it, and enjoy it.

Rik Anthony
National Host
All Star Radio Networks

As soon as I started reading this book, I could not put it down. I quickly was engrossed in story after story of interesting anecdotes as to a comic's true life on the road. There are definitely some chuckles in this very entertaining book, but the reader will quickly be deeply engrossed in the faceted sides of comedy, and to the totally unknown non-glamorous side of being a stand-up comic. If I ever had illusions of being a comedian and basking in the applause and endearments of the audience, these illusions have disappeared. This is definitely not a life for the sensitive personality. By the middle of the book I felt as if I knew all of the comedians personally, and I could comprehend their varied experiences and anguishes of being on the road.
I can easily visualize this book as a weekly television series of comedian's experiences on the road.
I am sure that there are many more stories which the authors have up their sleeves, and I anxiously await book 2 which I would call "I Killed Again".
The authors are to be congratulated.

This book takes you into the comedy trenches and excavates some of the greatest comedic anecdotes ever. Not only are the longer stories great but there are short segments that are really funny as well. The Tony Clifton and Kevin Pollack stories were my two favorites but I loved them all. The pacing of the book was great. I can't wait for volume 2.

I can manage saying something now and then to make someone else laugh. And I while I don't do much in the way of public performance, I don't have anything like stage fright. But I got shivers of anxiety when reading some of the stories in _I Killed: True Stories from the Road from America's Top Comics_ (Crown Publishers) by Ritch Shydner and Mark Schiff. There is a strong prospect of anxiety in anticipation of being shoved onto a stage with the assignment of getting laughs from a paying audience, perhaps an audience that would feel itself better entertained if you fell flat on your face, and is willing to take steps to make this happen. The anxiety is apparent in the title of the book, the comics' aggressive cry of success, of victory over an opposition seated on the other side of the footlights. Yet the anxiety feeds back into the humor; most of the stories here are better labeled "I Died", for they are not success stories at all. But the stories of failure here are resurrected into funny stories that are bound to get laughs this time around. These true stories (true, but no doubt colored in varying degrees by the tellers, scores of now-famous comics) are a wonderful record by practitioners of a very peculiar art form.

Many of these stories come as memories of the bad old days when the comics were just starting out and if the pay was forthcoming (it wasn't always) it was measly. Many stories here involve getting stiffed of a paycheck and perhaps therefore having to sneak back into the club late at night just to have a place to sleep. Plenty of the clubs you would not want to sleep in; Judy Tenuta remembers, "It's the winter of 1981 in Chicago, with maybe ten people in the audience, when a rat (the four-legged kind) runs across the stage. Suddenly the club owner takes out a gun and blasts it, then motions for me to continue with my show." Another consistent theme here is hecklers, a real job hazard. Judy Carter withstood a barrage of thrown shot glasses, and when "... that didn't work, a guy grabbed a table cloth, charged onstage, threw it over me - and lit me on _fire_." Another theme is bombing, which happens to new comics, and practiced ones too. It sounds awful. There's even a name for a physiological reaction in such a disaster, as Kathy Griffin recalls: "I started my act and it was just a disaster... The experience was so awful that I had actual flop sweat."

There are plenty of raunchy jokes and language here; after all, these are stories generally from young people (or about what happened to the tellers when they were young people), energetic, on the road, independent, and lonely. Even Bob Hope gave a tip to Dan Bradley having to do with gaining sexual favors from the waitresses at the clubs. There are other star turns here, like a recollection by Bob Zmuda about how Zmuda would perform disguised as Andy Kaufman's alter ego Tony Clifton, whereupon Kaufman in disguise would come to the theater and heckle Zmuda ("We know you're Andy Kaufman. Why are you doing this to the public?") until Kaufman got thrown out of the room. There is a visit from an elderly Milton Berle, recalled by Ritch Shydner, milking his aged persona onstage to have the whole audience behind him. "Well, folks, I gotta go," he said at one point, resulting in a big scream "No!" from the audience and a consequent one hour set. "People were screaming and cheering as he left the stage. By the time he made it to the back of the room, he was again just a frail old man greeting a growing line of well-wishers." With all the funny stories here, there are some with real heart, like Helen Kearney's encounter with an old man in the audience who didn't seem to be enjoying the show, but came to tell her afterwards how much he had enjoyed it, and that she had helped him through the day of the first anniversary of his wife's death. There's also a sweet recollection by Mark Schiff about transporting his dying father to see his son in one last show. Mostly, however, there are ridiculous stories (like the disgruntled audience member who didn't have anything against the ventriloquist but hated the smart-talking dummy, so he broke a beer bottle over the dummy's head). There are plenty of unpleasant moments that are in these pages, now mined for laughs. That's a good survival strategy; it's a jungle out there.

I am amazed that no one thought of writing this book sooner. Hysterical, brilliant, an enjoyable read. A few stories aren't so funny but that just gives you a chance to catch your breath from laughing so hard. BTW: After reading this rent Seinfeld's movie "Comedian" which goes well with this book.

There is very little comic insight in this book. A collection of short tales of debauchery and wild drug use that road comics would tell each other, the book makes a normal person feel like a rube who bought a ticket to the freak show. (Yes, there is just a hint of envy in that last statement.) Some of the stories are funny, in a "Porky's" sort of ashamed-that-I'm-laughing way.

Having said that, there are some high points in the book: Heath Hyche's "The N-Word Wins"; Steven Alan Green's "Spartacus Finally Gets a Laugh"; Larry the Cable Guy's story about John Fox; Dennis Blair's "My Mom Loves George Carlin." If you think of comics sitting around a table at the Waffle House at 3:00 a.m., swapping stories, then you'll get the idea. That may be the book's weak spot: it's geared toward other comics.

The reason I gave I KILLED only three stars is because it didn't really satisfy. Emotionally, the reader goes back and forth from awe to disgust to sad to inspired. If they released the DVD of this book, with the comedians telling the stories, I'd probably buy it, because I believe that how you tell these stories is the key to making them more entertaining. It just barely worked as a book.

I've never been able to tell a joke myself. But for all the people who can, I'm their best friend and their paycheck. I love brilliant comedy.

And when the comedy club scene first heated up in the Philly area in the mid 70's and forward, I was a constant customer, hanging out with comics all of my free time and had friends in all the club managements.

Local guys who would become marquee names like Craig Shoemaker were building their acts in the hometown clubs and future stars like Seinfeld and Dice Clay were passing through and building buzz. Every big city had a scene like Clay Heery's "Comedy Factory Outlet" in Old City Philly. So there had to be super-fans like myself in every town, who came and paid, howled, drank and left.... and, like me, still never REALLY knew the unbelievable "back-stories" of the traveling comedy circuit.

If you revere comedians, you've gotta buy this book. First, it's laugh-out-loud fun... all "insider" material and vividly described by guys and women who are letting us in on the secret lives they wouldn't want their parents to find out. In short, it's about all the indignities they survived just getting from gig to gig, getting THROUGH the gigs and surviving till the next gig.

It's fast-fun too. Readers' Digest-fast. The kind of book where you can read a chapter out loud to your friends before going out, to prime the laughs for the fun ahead with your pals. These road stories will appeal to anybody who ever made appointment-TV out of Saturday Night Live, Mad TV, The Colbert Report & Jon Stewart.

Of course, it's the must-read for anybody who dreams of being the next hot comic. They just shouldn't let their parents read it.....

Mark Schiff is a brilliant comic on stage and he proves equally adept at gathering together with Ritch Shyder a frequently hilarious book of anecdotes about a comics life on the road.

Yes, you can read it a bit at a time or just devour it all at once. A good read about an interesting profession with incredibly fascinating characters. Hard to remember it's non-fiction.